There are filmmakers who yearn for awards and others who champion causes and pet projects. But Andrew Lau focuses on one thing: getting moviegoers into cinema seats.

“I don’t care about the critics,” the Hong Kong director says. When “Infernal Affairs,” the crime thriller he directed with Alan Mak, broke out as a commercial as well as critical success, “of course, I’m happy,” he says. “But the most important thing is the box office. You don’t want a movie to have a lot of awards and no audience.”

His response to its ticket sales? Two sequels, both released the following year.

That range is showcased in a retrospective at this month’s Hong Kong International Film Festival, which is screening 11 of Mr. Lau’s films as director, producer and cinematographer. The lineup includes Wong Kar-wai’s 1988 feature debut, “As Tears Go By,” a triad film for which Mr. Lau was director of photography; the martial-arts blockbuster “The Storm Riders” (1998); “Dance of a Dream” (2001) a romantic comedy with music, dance and Andy Lau (no relation); and race-car action hit “Initial D” (2005), starring Jay Chou.

The retrospective also includes his most recent films, which both opened last year: “The Guillotines,” a visually lush 3-D period actioner about a group of blade-throwing assassins, which was a box-office disappointment in China, where martial-arts films have struggled over the past couple of years as audiences’ tastes evolve toward comedy; and “The Last Tycoon,” in which he served as producer and cinematographer. It starred Chow Yun-fat as a gangster in 1930s Japanese-occupied Shanghai and scored better with audiences.

Mr. Lau’s output is a result of his fast pace. He thinks out everything before going to the set, he says, and works to cultivate an upbeat, chummy atmosphere with the cast and crew.

But his patience wears thin when others don’t keep up. On a brisk morning in 2011, while shooting the final scene of “The Guillotines” in China’s Zhejiang province, crew members and visitors to the set were blocking his shot. “Out, out, out!” he bellowed, shooing away the crowd before letting the camera roll.

Mr. Lau, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, frequently plays the triple threat of director, producer and cinematographer, giving him the authority to oversee every aspect of his movies, from camera angles and lighting to design and costumes. Doing it all, he says, “is better. It makes the work efficient.”

“He can do anything,” says Andy Lau, who starred in “Infernal Affairs,” “Dance of a Dream” and several other Andrew Lau movies. “It’s very comfortable for me to work with [him], because he will prepare everything for any artist in order to make a movie better.”

According to John Chong, an executive producer of “Infernal Affairs,” Mr. Lau is a studio’s dream: He gets films finished on time and within (or even under) their budgets. “His efficiency as a director for daily shooting is the best I have ever seen in Hong Kong cinema,” Mr. Chong says. “He treats films as his life.”

His attitude can be summed up as “don’t waste my time,” says Mr. Lau.

“My good friend Wong Kar-wai can take five years” to make a film, he says. “I’m not that patient. I want to make it at a tempo like this,” snapping his fingers.

Mr. Lau began tinkering with cameras in high school (he now collects vintage models and displays them in his Kowloon office). By 21, he was working as a trainee for the Shaw Brothers Studio, which produced dozens of martial-arts flicks in Hong Kong.

“I was a camera assistant’s assistant,” he says—the bottom of the food chain—which meant lugging around camera-tracking rails and boxes of heavy equipment. Within six months he graduated to camera assistant, and a few years later wedged his way behind the camera, working as cinematographer for Ringo Lam’s gritty crime hit “City on Fire” (1987).

His work was noticed and soon Mr. Lau was sitting in the director’s chair. “At that time there were 400 movies a year, and they needed good directors,” he says. “It was a golden era.”

He made his directorial debut in 1990, but it wasn’t until six years later that he hit gold with “Young and Dangerous.” He gave the tired triad genre a fresh shot of energy with his innovative camera work. He made three sequels within a year, and the film spawned additional sequels, prequels and spinoffs, often by other directors.

“I still remember I shot the first one in 20 days and finished in a month. The second one also shot in 15 to 16 days,” he says. “The audience liked it, so why not?”

By the mid-1990s, however, Hong Kong movies were in decline, weakened by an appetite for flashier Hollywood blockbusters and a flight of talent.

That changed in 2002 with the release of “Infernal Affairs,” about an undercover cop posing as a triad member and a mobster who has infiltrated the police force. With its big-name cast (in addition to Andy Lau, it featured “In the Mood for Love” star Tony Leung, and Anthony Wong, who headlines the 2013 reboot of “Ip Man”) and strong production values, it rewrote the playbook on Hong Kong films and resurrected an industry that had been declared all but dead.

Hollywood took notice. Martin Scorsese adapted it in 2006 as “The Departed,” which went on to win Academy Awards for best picture and director. (He didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Seven years later, the two are teaming up for “Revenge of the Green Dragons,” a film directed by Mr. Lau and produced by Mr. Scorsese. Based on a 1992 New Yorker article about the violent world of Chinese gangs in New York City, it begins shooting next month.

“Green Dragons” marks Mr. Lau’s second American movie after “The Flock,” a 2007 thriller starring Richard Gere that barely registered with audiences. Mr. Lau found his first flirtation with Hollywood restrictive compared with the flexibility he was used to back home.

“Shooting in Hong Kong, you can do whatever you want, even change the script every day,” he says. “In Hollywood, you have to have a lot of meetings.”

“Green Dragons” will be different, Mr. Lau says. With no major stars and a price tag under $10 million, it’s “not a big-budget movie,” he says, “so there’s room for more freedom.”